Talking About Large Language Models

I used chatGPT to solve a sqlite bug involving a query that was taking 4 seconds to run. I pasted the query and it identified many possible issues with the query including the offending problem (it was missing an index on a timestamp).

It also passed 3/4 of our companies interview process including forging a resume that passed the recruiter filter.

That being said, I COMPLETELY agree with you that chatGPT will not disrupt anything. Your example cases are completely as VALID as are my example cases.

chatGPT is, however, the precursor to the thing that will disrupt everything.

This paper, and most other places i’ve seen it argued that language models can’t possibly be conscious, sentient, thinking etc, rely heavily on the idea that llms are ‘just’ doing statistical prediction of tokens.

I personally find this utterly unconvincing. For a start, I’m not entirely sure that’s not what I’m doing in typing out this message. My brain is ‘just’ chemistry, so clearly can’t have beliefs or be conscious, right?

But more relevant is the fact that llms like ChatGPT are only pre-trained on pure statistical generation, followed by further tuning through reinforcement learning. So ChatGPT is no longer simply doing pure statistical modelling, though of course the interface of calculating logits for the next token remains the same.

note: i’m not saying i think llms are conscious. I don’t think the question even makes much sense. I am saying all the arguments that i’ve seen for why they aren’t have been very unsatisfying.

> In science, if you don't know, you don't make the claim, that is basic positivism and the scientific method.

Yes you're correct. So you can't make the claim that it's NOT cognition. That is my point. You also can't make the claim that it is cognition which was the OTHER point. Completely agree with your statement here.

But it goes further then this, and your statement shows YOU don't understand science.

>So basic in fact, I was thought this in elementary school. So far ad-hominem attributions of naivety.

No science is complex and basically most people don't understand the scientific method and it's limitations. It's not basic at all, not even people who graduate from four year colleges in STEM fully understand the true nature of science. Or even many scientists!

In science and therefore reality as we know it; nothing can be proven. This is because every subsequent observation can completely contradict an initial claim. Proof is the domain of logic and math, it doesn't exist in reality. Things can be disproven but nothing can actually be proven. That is science.

This is subtle stuff, but it's legit. I'll quote Einstein if you don't believe me:

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." - Einstein

And a link for further investigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Anyway all of this says that NO claim can be made about anything unless it's disproof. Which is exactly inline with what I'm saying.

Still claims are made all the time anyway in academia and the majority of these claims aren't technically scientific. This occurs because we can't practically operate on anything in reality if we can't in actuality claim things are true. So we do it anyway despite lack of any form of actual proof.

>Anyone that humanises computation is not only committing an A.I. faux-pas but are going against the basic scientific method.

But so is dismissing any similarity to humans. You can't technically say it's wrong or right. Especially when the outputs and inputs to these models are very similar to what humans would say.

This is basic preschool stuff I knew this when I was a baby! I thought everybody knew this! .

Were the pyramids of Giza built by aliens? Well, it sure looks that way if you focus exclusively on evidence that’s open to your preferred interpretation… And as for the all opposing evidence, nobody can disprove that it’s just the aliens trying to hide their tracks.

Machine cognition is a similarly extraordinary claim that’s going to need a lot more evidence than a just-right sequence of inputs and outputs.

I don't know if you played with chatGPT but it's much more than a just right sequence of inputs and outputs.

I have already incorporated into my daily use (as a programmer). It has huge flaws but the output is anecdotally amazing enough that the claim of "cognition" is not as extraordinary as you think it is.

Especially given the fact that we don't even fully understand what cognition is, the claim that it is NOT cognition is equally just as crazy.